Hightower Lowdown

Democratic leaders in Washington have responded to the Supreme Court's January dictate allowing oceans of corporate campaign cash to flood America's elections.

It's the DISCLOSE Act (or, more fully, the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act). Gosh, couldn't they come up with a more cumbersome title?

The substance of the bill is that campaign ads must reveal who paid for them. That's good but--that's it? That's like legalizing bank robbery, as long as the robbers wear name tags.

A nationwide coalition is pushing a tougher response--a constitutional amendment to overrule the Court: www.freespeechforpeople.org.

Meanwhile, the banksters of Wall Street have also escaped real change in the Democratic-controlled Congress. The American people demanded reform, said the Senate banking chairman, and "this [bill] is their victory." So why are all the big bankers smiling? Because despite Washington's populist rhetoric, they know that the White House and Congress are letting them escape with a mere increase in regulations, keeping their overwhelming size and power and their monopolistic market control intact. They wriggled out of the real populist proposals to break up all "too-big-to-fail" banks and to decentralize Wall Street power.

How did they escape? Money. In the past year, while Congress's banking committees have been writing the reform bill, Wall Street executives and lobbyists have held 845 fundraising events for the members of those committees, putting millions of dollars into their re-election campaigns.